Redux has brought the notion of reducer back into the awareness of many developers for whom they are a novel concept. In fact they are quite simple, and used all the time in such things as SUM aggregations in databases, where they compute a single value from many.
It's great that Redux has made reducers known to a broader audience, though they are relatively ancient concepts in programming, in fact. But the particular way Redux illustrates a reducer in its documentaion is, in my opinion, with a coding style that is harder to extend and read than it should be. Let's distill reducers down to their essensce, and build up Redux reducers in a way that lowers complexity, and helps separate Redux idioms from your business logic.
A reducer is a pure function that accepts more arguments than it returns. That is to say - one whose "arity" is greater than 1. It 'reduces' the two things you pass it down to a single value. Here are two reducers, in a map
